After watching the first portion of the above trailer for Hulu’s new comedy series Future Man, you’d be forgiven for thinking something along the lines of “Hey, haven’t I seen something like this before? Isn’t this the exact premise of The Last Starfighter?” A young man contacted by futuristic travelers and told he’s a savior because of his above-average performance in a videogame that was secretly a sci-fi training simulator? Sounds the exact same, right?
But then Future Man pulls the rug out from underneath you by making that exact joke. “Ah,” you suddenly realize. “So we’re dealing with a self-aware comedy, then.”
Future Man is the new Hulu series from Kyle Hunter and Ariel Shaffir, the producers behind Sausage Party, and is directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the team also behind the already-mentioned anthropomorphic food movie, as well as This is the End and AMC’s delightfully zany Preacher. It stars Josh Hutcherson of The Hunger Games fame as “Josh Futturman, a janitor by day/gamer by night who is recruited by mysterious visitors to travel through time in order to prevent the extinction of humanity.”
If the trailer is to be believed, that extinction of humanity has a lot to do with Keith David’s attempt to cure herpes. Ah, NOW it feels like a Seth Rogen production, right?
All episodes of Future Man will premiere Tuesday, Nov. 14, on Hulu.